The production of food and goods through farming or agriculture has been central to the rise and maintenance of the world's population. Throughout history, key developments in the agriculture industry allowed for the stabilization of the food supply, thereby allowing the development of more densely populated areas such as cities and towns. More recently, agriculture has taken a larger role in providing energy in the form of, for example, corn ethanol and soybean ethanol. Thus agriculture, while historically important for supplying edible goods for consumption by humans and livestock, is now proving to be of greater importance by providing both edible goods and alternatives to fossil fuels.
The development of irrigation systems is just one of many advancements that have greatly altered the agriculture industry. One of the earliest forms of irrigation was to dig a water channel or row to direct the flow of water to the various crops in a field. Other early forms of irrigation included vertical wells and gently sloping tunnels, underground canals and a series of water-wheels. Today there are several different forms of irrigation which can be broadly categorized as surface irrigation, drip irrigation, sprinkler irrigation and center-pivot irrigation. Surface irrigation uses gravity to move water across the land, and can be characterized by the use of furrows, border strips or basins. Drip irrigation functions to deliver water near the root zone of plants and sprinkler and center-pivot irrigation systems utilize sprinkler heads in fixed positions or on wheeled bases or wheeled towers to supply water to plants.
However, all of these methods of irrigation have several disadvantages in their use. For example, sprinkler and center-pivot irrigation systems utilize a series of sprinkler heads to provide water. These sprinkler systems place a stream of water into the air which then will fall onto the plants. This is a very inefficient method of irrigation as a portion of the water evaporates into the air before settling on the surfaces of the plants or being absorbed into the soil. Further, the sprinkler heads that provide the water are often highly complex, are expensive and require continual maintenance to keep in operating form. For instance, the sprinkler heads may require a full deconstruction in order to clean the parts due to various minerals in the water. Further, these systems require a mounting system and are often large and complex mobile systems that allow for the sprinklers to move across the land needing irrigation. Finally, the sprinkler and center-pivot systems apply water to large areas at once and thus are not able to apply water to specific plants.
Drip irrigation systems also have their own disadvantages. Specifically, drip systems are expensive to install especially the systems that are installed underground close to the roots. These drip systems require a significant outlay in capital to trench the fields and lay the water-providing drip hoses. In other direct-drip applications, the costs are still high due to the costs of the extensive drip-hose and nozzle network. Further, the drip irrigation systems also require a significant amount of maintenance because the drop nozzles are prone to clogging from various impurities in the water. A related disadvantage is that drip systems almost always require the use of a filter or series of filters to reduce the number of clogging impurities in the water. In addition, drip irrigation systems are often the most complex systems due to the direct nature of the irrigation. Each drip system may have thousands of drip valves that need to be monitored and maintained as well as an extensive hose system that needs constant maintenance and repair. Finally, similar to the sprinkler systems described above, drip irrigation is not able to regulate the water supply to individual plants or groups of plants without running independent drip irrigation lines to the individual plants or adding several junctions or inline valves to the system.
The various methods of surface irrigation such as basin, bay and furrow irrigation also have similar disadvantages in their application. For instance, basin irrigation often requires a land area to be filled with water, which will then permeate the ground and possibly drain into an adjacent property. This is inefficient in that much of the water will evaporate before being absorbed by the plants. Further, basin irrigation efficiency requires significant research into the soil composition in relation to the crops as water that doesn't drain effectively can have significant detrimental effects on the crop thus greatly reducing yields. As such, basin irrigation is often utilized by farmers who are growing crops that need a significant amount of water and don't require any regulation of water supply beyond “flooding”.
Furrow irrigation often utilizes several small channels in the field along with the gravitational pull created by a slope to move the water down the channel to the plants. Thus, basic furrow irrigation may be cost effective but it requires a significant amount of water flow planning because the amount of water provided is reduced as you move from the source. Further, furrow irrigation is not able to target a specific plant or a series of plants and instead is applied to a larger area of land as in many of the other irrigation methods outlined above. Recent developments in furrow irrigation have brought the use of various pipe systems to allow for a more efficient flow of water and to overcome some of the issues with water distribution. These include a gated pipe system that utilizes sliding gate valves in order to alter the flow of water from the water source. However, these gated valves require that a person, often a farmer or farm-hand, walk through the fields with a gated-pipe valve opener and manually open and close all gates. In other recent implementations, a series of pneumatic pipes is affixed to the gated pipe and sliding gate valves and pressurized air is used to open and close the gates. However, these pneumatic gate control systems require a complex and extensive run of air hoses to be placed throughout the field and do not allow the independent control of each gate in the gated pipe. Further, various portions of the pneumatic system suffer from air pressure drops thus leading to operation inefficiency in that gates will not function unless you maintain a constant air pressure across all gates. Finally, these pneumatic systems are all interconnected, thus if there is a break in the hose providing the pressure to open or close the gate, the whole system will become inoperable. A break would thus require the manual checking of the entire length of hose to determine the location of break and to restore operation to the sliding valves. Thus, even with the advances in gated pipe technology, there are still large inefficiencies in the furrow method of irrigation in order to obtain the optimal water flow for various areas of land.
Given the various disadvantages outlined above, a need exists for an automatic gated-pipe actuator that is self contained, cost-effective and provides independent, automatic gate control, and infinitely-variable water flow.